William Brown is a professor and author who has chosen Fujian province as his "second home". His book on Quanzhou was written after a suggestion from president Xi Jinping.

My father especially was not happy when I came to mainland China because you know I was in the military for 7 years, and he was in the military for 18 years. And for 11 years, there has been fighting with Asia, in the Korean War, Vietnam War.

He was not too happy about that. But as soon as I got to China, I thought China is very different from what I expected and I started writing letters home. I've been doing now, for 26 years now, writing a newsletter, sort of humorous letters called "After war back in China".

And just to explain what it is like here, and say, yeah, you know, it is true that China has lots of problems. For any country like this big, this many people, so poor, it's gonna have a lot of problems. But it also has a lot of good.

So, you know, I was very critical about China, like my father, like others. But as I learned more about China, began to see what Chinese people were like, I thought we really should be helping each other, not fighting it, you know. So it was really encouraging to me and to my father. The last time I saw my father, that's what he told me.

First Christmas. We were so excited. We found this. They used this little tree in bars, you know, not for Christmas. But we bought it and used it for that.

This is my Chinese teacher.

This cooking, we had thirty something foreigners in one tiny place. And they gave us one thing for thirty something foreigners to cook on.

Actually I wrote a book about Quanzhou because of Xi Jinping. He was the governor at that time. And my wife and I went to Fuzhou and had a dinner with him. And he said, "You wrote about Xiamen your 'second hometown'", he said, "You should write about Quanzhou your 'third hometown'". I said OK. So now I've written ten books about Fujian. But he would not remember that. He would not remember me. But I remember that.

But now, I've written a lot about Fujian. The last two books have been more about Fujian's history because I find even Fujian people don't really know how rich their heritage really is, especially the young people. But I've found they're interested in it. Sometimes I go to like Chinese high schools and I speak to Chinese children about Fujian's history and they love it.

Well, actually this tree, originally, I had a shorter tree. I put a Christmas tree. We got an alive tree for Christmas and after Christmas I planted it here. And it got about that tall. Now it's taller than the whole building.

And my father passed away in 2004. But just three months before he passed away, I was in the US with him. I was so happy because he said that he's so proud that I came to China and stayed here because he's learned a lot from it. And he was just maybe he'd've done things differently.